This is how Jimmy Carter came to write Christmas in
Plains, a memoir about all his Christmases from boyhood to president to
now.

His publisher, Simon & Schuster, was encouraging him to
write a sequel to his splendid memoir, An Hour Before Daylight, which
ends with Carter leaving his beloved Plains, Ga., for college. He did not want
to just pick up where he left off. "It'd be interesting," he says, "but I had
already written parts of it."

He says he was "casting about" for an idea. "I didn't really
know what I was going to do," he says.

He was always drawn to Christmas, the way it is both traditional
and changing. First, as a child waiting for Santa Claus (in that familiar Southern
cadence, he pronounces it Santy Claus). Now, as a grandparent holding his family
together at least once a year. There are 23 of them, including his wife, Rosalynn,
children and grandchildren.

He went online to research Christmas memoirs and found
A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas (his favorite poet) and
A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. He read both and found them different
from each other. "So, I thought, Christmas is a wide-open field."

His personal favorite Christmas story to read is from the
Bible, "Luke's beautiful account of the first Christmas," he says. "I am by
far the most drawn to the explanation of where Christ was born."

In Christmas in Plains, we learn how he presented
his case for good gifts to his parents. Anything, he thought, but underwear
and socks. The little Red Racer wagon would be good for hauling wood to the
house, he argued, when he really pictured flying down a steep hill with his
buddy A.D.

He writes: "The process of our expressing hopes and their
dashing them was strangely routine and impersonal, our goal being to obtain
as much as possible for ourselves and theirs to minimize disappointment when
we didn't get what we wanted. At least for us children, Baby Jesus was not involved
in this important dialogue."